How do i get bitcoins

Select personalised ads. Apply market research to generate audience insights. Measure content performance. Develop and improve products. List of Partners vendors. Cryptocurrency mining is painstaking, costly, and only sporadically rewarding. Nonetheless, mining has a magnetic appeal for many investors interested in cryptocurrency because of the fact that miners are rewarded for their work with crypto tokens.

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This may be because entrepreneurial types see mining as pennies from heaven, like California gold prospectors in And if you are technologically inclined, why not do it? However, before you invest the time and equipment, read this explainer to see whether mining is really for you.

We will focus primarily on Bitcoin throughout, we'll use "Bitcoin" when referring to the network or the cryptocurrency as a concept, and "bitcoin" when we're referring to a quantity of individual tokens. The primary draw for many mining is the prospect of being rewarded with Bitcoin.

That said, you certainly don't have to be a miner to own cryptocurrency tokens.

How Does Bitcoin Mining Work?

You can also buy cryptocurrencies using fiat currency ; you can trade it on an exchange like Bitstamp using another crypto as an example, using Ethereum or NEO to buy Bitcoin ; you even can earn it by shopping, publishing blog posts on platforms that pay users in cryptocurrency, or even set up interest-earning crypto accounts. An example of a crypto blog platform is Steemit , which is kind of like Medium except that users can reward bloggers by paying them in a proprietary cryptocurrency called STEEM. The Bitcoin reward that miners receive is an incentive that motivates people to assist in the primary purpose of mining: to legitimize and monitor Bitcoin transactions, ensuring their validity.

Because these responsibilities are spread among many users all over the world, Bitcoin is a "decentralized" cryptocurrency, or one that does not rely on any central authority like a central bank or government to oversee its regulation. Miners are getting paid for their work as auditors. They are doing the work of verifying the legitimacy of Bitcoin transactions. This convention is meant to keep Bitcoin users honest and was conceived by bitcoin's founder, Satoshi Nakamoto.

By verifying transactions, miners are helping to prevent the " double-spending problem.

Double spending is a scenario in which a bitcoin owner illicitly spends the same bitcoin twice. While there is the possibility of counterfeit cash being made, it is not exactly the same as literally spending the same dollar twice. With digital currency, however, as the Investopedia dictionary explains, "there is a risk that the holder could make a copy of the digital token and send it to a merchant or another party while retaining the original.

If you were to try to spend both the real bill and the fake one, someone that took the trouble of looking at both of the bills' serial numbers would see that they were the same number, and thus one of them had to be false. What a Bitcoin miner does is analogous to that—they check transactions to make sure that users have not illegitimately tried to spend the same bitcoin twice.

This isn't a perfect analogy—we'll explain in more detail below.

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Once miners have verified 1 MB megabyte worth of bitcoin transactions , known as a "block," those miners are eligible to be rewarded with a quantity of bitcoin more about the bitcoin reward below as well. The 1 MB limit was set by Satoshi Nakamoto, and is a matter of controversy, as some miners believe the block size should be increased to accommodate more data, which would effectively mean that the bitcoin network could process and verify transactions more quickly. Note that verifying 1 MB worth of transactions makes a coin miner eligible to earn bitcoin—not everyone who verifies transactions will get paid out.

It depends on how much data the transactions take up. That is correct. To earn bitcoins, you need to meet two conditions. One is a matter of effort; one is a matter of luck. This is the easy part. This process is also known as proof of work. The good news: No advanced math or computation is involved. You may have heard that miners are solving difficult mathematical problems—that's not exactly true. What they're actually doing is trying to be the first miner to come up with a digit hexadecimal number a " hash " that is less than or equal to the target hash. It's basically guesswork. The bad news: It's guesswork, but with the total number of possible guesses for each of these problems being on the order of trillions, it's incredibly arduous work.

In order to solve a problem first, miners need a lot of computing power. That is a great many hashes. If you want to estimate how much bitcoin you could mine with your mining rig's hash rate, the site Cryptocompare offers a helpful calculator. In addition to lining the pockets of miners and supporting the bitcoin ecosystem, mining serves another vital purpose: It is the only way to release new cryptocurrency into circulation.

In other words, miners are basically "minting" currency.

For example, as of Nov. In the absence of miners, Bitcoin as a network would still exist and be usable, but there would never be any additional bitcoin. There will eventually come a time when Bitcoin mining ends; per the Bitcoin Protocol, the total number of bitcoins will be capped at 21 million. This does not mean that transactions will cease to be verified. Miners will continue to verify transactions and will be paid in fees for doing so in order to keep the integrity of Bitcoin's network.

Aside from the short-term Bitcoin payoff, being a coin miner can give you "voting" power when changes are proposed in the Bitcoin network protocol. In other words, miners have a degree of influence on the decision-making process on such matters as forking. The rewards for bitcoin mining are reduced by half every four years. When bitcoin was first mined in , mining one block would earn you 50 BTC. In , this was halved to 25 BTC. By , this was halved again to On May 11, , the reward halved again to 6. If you want to keep track of precisely when these halvings will occur, you can consult the Bitcoin Clock , which updates this information in real-time.

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Interestingly, the market price of bitcoin has, throughout its history, tended to correspond closely to the reduction of new coins entered into circulation. This lowering inflation rate increased scarcity and historically the price has risen with it. If you are interested in seeing how many blocks have been mined thus far, there are several sites, including Blockchain.

Although early on in Bitcoin's history individuals may have been able to compete for blocks with a regular at-home computer, this is no longer the case.

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The reason for this is that the difficulty of mining Bitcoin changes over time. In order to ensure the smooth functioning of the blockchain and its ability to process and verify transactions, the Bitcoin network aims to have one block produced every 10 minutes or so. However, if there are one million mining rigs competing to solve the hash problem, they'll likely reach a solution faster than a scenario in which 10 mining rigs are working on the same problem.

For that reason, Bitcoin is designed to evaluate and adjust the difficulty of mining every 2, blocks, or roughly every two weeks. When there is more computing power collectively working to mine for Bitcoin, the difficulty level of mining increases in order to keep block production at a stable rate. Less computing power means the difficulty level decreases.

How to get started with Bitcoin or Bitcoin Cash

To get a sense of just how much computing power is involved, when Bitcoin launched in the initial difficulty level was one. As of Nov. All of this is to say that, in order to mine competitively, miners must now invest in powerful computer equipment like a GPU graphics processing unit or, more realistically, an application-specific integrated circuit ASIC.

Some miners—particularly Ethereum miners—buy individual graphics cards GPUs as a low-cost way to cobble together mining operations. The photo below is a makeshift, home-made mining machine. The graphics cards are those rectangular blocks with whirring fans. Note the sandwich twist-ties holding the graphics cards to the metal pole. This is probably not the most efficient way to mine, and as you can guess, many miners are in it as much for the fun and challenge as for the money.

The ins and outs of bitcoin mining can be difficult to understand as is. Consider this illustrative example of how the hash problem works: I tell three friends that I'm thinking of a number between one and , and I write that number on a piece of paper and seal it in an envelope. My friends don't have to guess the exact number; they just have to be the first person to guess any number that is less than or equal to the number I am thinking of. And there is no limit to how many guesses they get.

Let's say I'm thinking of the number There is no "extra credit" for Friend B, even though B's answer was closer to the target answer of Now imagine that I pose the "guess what number I'm thinking of" question, but I'm not asking just three friends, and I'm not thinking of a number between 1 and Rather, I'm asking millions of would-be miners and I'm thinking of a digit hexadecimal number.

Now you see that it's going to be extremely hard to guess the right answer. In Bitcoin terms, simultaneous answers occur frequently, but at the end of the day, there can only be one winning answer. Typically, it is the miner who has done the most work or, in other words, the one that verifies the most transactions.

The losing block then becomes an " orphan block. Miners who successfully solve the hash problem but who haven't verified the most transactions are not rewarded with bitcoin. Well, here is an example of such a number:. The number above has 64 digits. Easy enough to understand so far. As you probably noticed, that number consists not just of numbers, but also letters of the alphabet.

Why is that? To understand what these letters are doing in the middle of numbers, let's unpack the word "hexadecimal. As you know, we use the "decimal" system, which means it is base This, in turn, means that every digit of a multi-digit number has 10 possibilities, zero through nine. In a hexadecimal system, each digit has 16 possibilities. But our numeric system only offers 10 ways of representing numbers zero through nine. That's why you have to stick letters in, specifically letters a, b, c, d, e, and f.

If you are mining bitcoin, you do not need to calculate the total value of that digit number the hash.